US PRESIDENT Barack Obama has ordered the US government to review detection methods to determine how a suspected terrorist ignited an explosive aboard a Northwest Airlines aircraft en route to Detroit on Christmas Day.
Homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano said investigations were under way. “We are investigating, as always, going backwards to see what happened and when, who knew what and when.
“There was simply throughout the law enforcement community never information that would put this individual on a ‘no-fly’ list,” she said.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Mr Obama, on holiday in Hawaii, directed the department of homeland security, aviation regulators and law enforcement agencies to review safety procedures and information on government databases to determine how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian suspect, avoided detection.
Mr Abdulmutallab, a former student of University College London, has been charged with attempting to blow up the transatlantic airliner carrying 278 passengers.
“Did we do what we needed to do with that information, and how can we revise watch-listing procedures going forward, to ensure there’s no clog in the bureaucratic plumbing of information?” Mr Gibbs said yesterday on ABC television.
Ms Napolitano declined to say whether investigators had determined a clear link between Mr Abdulmutallab and al-Qaeda.
“That is now the subject of an investigation and it would be inappropriate for me to say” pending investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities.
“We are going to go back and really do a minute-by-minute, day-by- day scrub” of any information on Mr Abdulmutallab, including concerns by his father, a prominent Nigerian banker, who alerted the US about a month ago about his son’s potentially extremist views, Ms Napolitano said.
An administration official, speaking anonymously, said Mr Abdulmutallab was added in November of 2009 to the government’s terrorist identities datamart environment, or Tide, a list of more than 550,000 people with suspected terrorist ties.
The official declined to say what had prompted the inclusion of Mr Abdulmutallab’s name on the list.
“When he presented himself to fly, he was on a Tide list,” Ms Napolitano said, which meant “his name had come up somewhere, somehow”.
Inclusion on the list doesn’t prevent someone from flying or prompt more security screening. – (Bloomberg)